SID: You graduated medical school. You have a degree in chemistry, you had a good career in medical programming and you were a believer in the messiah but you weren’t one that would see someone and pray for them. That wasn’t you. You were respected professional. You’re not going to do something like that. So, what were you doing with the person with the shoulder problem?
DR. JOE: Heidi, my wife, she was in the window blind aisle and she had struck up a lively conversation with a man there and I was coming from customer service and I came down the aisle and I watched all this and we were trying to get in and out of the place, but I found out that when we’re inconvenienced, that’s exactly when God is up to something. So, we listened to this man. He told us about his profession and all these kinds of things and I waited until the end and I looked at him and I said, “Can we pray for you?” He said, “Sure you can pray for me.” So, Heidi and I both laid hands on him and we just prayed a prayer of protection and blessing over him. His work and his future.
He said, “Wow, I feel so much better.”
I feel so much better now. Thank you.
DR. JOE: Then Heidi looked at him and she said, “Do you have pain anywhere in your body? Now, this man was a really robust athletic looking man. Didn’t indicate that he had pain anywhere, but he said, “Yes.” He said, “I fell off a two story building onto my left shoulder. He said, “Ever since then, I have pain in my shoulder and I can only lift my arm to about this much.” I said, “Can we pray for you?”
Sure.
DR. JOE: In the name of Jesus, we command that pain to go. I said, “Well, try it out now.” He raised his arm to the side about 90 degrees and he goes, “That’s so much better.” I said, “Is that all you can do?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Well, we’re not going to leave it that way. We’re going to do that again.” So, we prayed the exact same prayer again. I said, “Now”–
SID: You don’t sound like any doctor I’ve ….
DR. JOE: We prayed that exact same prayer again. We said, “Well, try it again.” He went like this and all of a sudden his arm went to the sky and his eyes got as big as saucers. He said, “What did you do?” He kept lifting his arm up and down and up and down and just rejoicing in the Lord. So, we went to the front of the store and there was a store clerk there. I said, “Tell her what happened to you.” He said, “I could only lift my arm to this and then Dr. Joe prayed for me.” He called me Mr. Joe because he didn’t know I was a doctor. He prayed for me and now I can do this. Now I can do this. He went out of the store rejoicing in the blessing of the goodness of God.
SID: But that wasn’t you. That wasn’t the Dr. Joe in 2004 when something changed your life that led you to be who you are today. What happened?
DR. JOE: Well, I was programming because I’m a programmer now. I was slouched down in my executive chair and I warped my back and it caused me incredible back pain. So, I had since that time I had two different surgeries and so I had an injection in my back. Because of that injection in my back, I had pain that was absolutely incredible. The lower part of my body was constantly in pain. One lady who had the same disease that I had called arachnoiditis said it was like sliding down a razor blade in iodine. That’s how painful it was.
SID: So, if I was to say a level of 1 to 10, 10 being the worst pain, what number were you at?
DR. JOE: 15. 20. I was in bed all day long.
SID: All the time?
DR. JOE: I would take a pillow when it would get so bad, I would take a pillow and put it over my face and just scream. You could hear me from the other side of the house. That’s how bad it was. I had to stand to eat. I couldn’t even sit and that was only for a short period of time. Most of the time, I spent my time on a massage table on my stomach because my wife had to massage my muscles because they were starting to atrophy because I had been in bed for so long.
SID: Now when you were finally diagnosed, what were you diagnosed with?
DR. JOE: It was called arachnoiditis. It was an incurable disease, very painful.
SID: But all of that pain stuff they have now for cancer and stuff, that didn’t help you?
DR. JOE: No. They gave me every medication you can imagine. Medications for cancer, for neural problems. They had given me the highest cancer drug that you can have and nothing worked. They even put a stimulator in my back to try to reduce the pain. I had three operations for that and that still didn’t work. They finally had to take it out.
SID: But you’re a medical doctor. How in the world could you contemplate suicide?
DR. JOE: When the pain gets so bad, Sid, when I was younger I couldn’t imagine people wanting to commit suicide. Life is not that bad. But when the pain gets so bad that that’s all you do, I couldn’t even put a three word sentence together it was so bad.
SID: So, you were actually saving up pain pills that you knew as a doctor if you took enough you would be killed. You didn’t you do it?
DR. JOE: Well, most people would say it’s probably your concern, but what God would think. I didn’t care what God thought at the time. I thought God had abandoned me. I thought he didn’t love me anymore. So, the only thing that kept me from doing it was thinking that my wife and my kids because I had teenagers at the time would wake up and see me dead in bed and I couldn’t do that to them but I wanted so badly to do that.
SID: Dr. Joe, as you just heard lost all hope. But his wife Heidi said, “If I have to throw you over my shoulder and carry you across the finish line, we’re going to see you healed.” Be right back.
